Powered By Janome: Bethany Nixon of RewareVintage and HandmadeDetroit
She has a wonderful knack for combining vintage finds, modern fashion, and a great eye for style.
Bethany Nixon is a mom, a successful blogger, and one of the founders of Handmade Detroit (which just had a huge craft fair last week). She sells her unique finds and creations through RewareVintage.com--and we're proud to say she does her sewing on a Janome.
Bethany has always loved all things vintage. Back in 1999, when she was in college, she discovered that she could make a consistent income selling vintage items on a new website called eBay.
Years later, she was working at a job she hated and still dreaming of owning her own brick and mortar vintage shop. Dan, now her husband, was a web designer and programmer and encouraged her to start an online vintage store. With his help she launched RewareVintage.com in 2005.
She describes the site this way, "Besides selling vintage, we decided to include my other passions--crafting, sewing and music in our Reware section of the site. It’s part vintage, part crafty, and lets me show you my creativity."
Bethany learned to hand sew in the Girl Scouts when she was in elementary school, but didn't get a sewing machine until her last semester of college. She took a sewing 101 course and instantly fell in love with it. She now sews a lot for Reware Vintage, both mending and altering vintage clothing, and also sewing new creations from vintage fabrics that she finds along her journeys.
She says, "Sewing began as a creative outlet for me, later turned into a key part of my own business, and ended up introducing me to some of my best friends--the ladies and my partners in Handmade Detroit, and so many other talented sewers and crafters in Michigan! Sewing is more than a hobby for me, it literally introduced me to a whole new world that I love being a part of in so many ways."
Bethany uses a Janome Decor Excel 5018, which was a graduation gift from her family. "One of the best gifts I have ever gotten!" she says. "It has a lot of great stitches and gets through every project I have with gusto!"
Sewing for her business has given her a great deal of satisfaction. "I love projects that teach me a new technique," Bethany says. "I have the most fun when I am learning! I try new patterns whenever I can, and whether it is a purse for a customer or a new jacket for my son, Roy, it is always more fun when I can discover a new technique. I also love to experiment by adding my own touches to a vintage pattern."
See Bethany's creations at her RewareVintage store, read her RewareVintage blog, and find out about the local crafting community at the Handmade Detroit website.
The Decor Excel 5018 machine is no longer available. But your local Janome dealer has several decor machines with the same power and reliability but even more stitches and features--like the 3160 Quilter's Decor Computer.
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